The Little Red Blog

Friday Thought: "Error Has No Rights"

{The following is taken from a September 2021 blog post by Mark Shea. It reflects Mr. Shea’s opinions and not my own; but it is, I think, a helpful introduction to the controversial claim that “Error has no rights”. Whatever the epistemological validity of that assertion, in practice error is often in the eye of the beholder; truth and error are frequently found mixed in uncertain proportions; and a quick look back at either the Inquisition or Bolshevik-Soviet history shows what can happen when “Error has no rights” becomes state policy. In short, while I sympathize with Mr. Shea's outrage over the prevarications of the MAGA universe, I am not sure he has given this topic sufficient thought.}

Mark Shea:

“Error has no rights”: Medieval Christians deeply believed this formula. It fired any number of bonfires that consumed the bodies of heretics. It gave strength to the arms of men who racked people for teachings contrary to the Faith or dangerous to civil peace.

Because of this, postmodern minds tend to look back on the notion that Error Has No Rights with the serene assumption that arrogance and nothing but arrogance fueled it. They pride themselves today on their tolerance.

Or they have until recently. Now, postmodern minds have discovered that the medieval Christians were perfectly right: Error has no rights. Morons and liars who prattle, “I’m entitled to my opinion” as their all-excusing way of asserting the validity of their stupid claims, ignorant views, ill-informed blather, and murderous lies are, very simply, wrong. They may feel entitled. Indeed, fools feel nothing but entitled. But we are, in fact, not entitled to a counter-factual opinion–particularly when such opinions are deadly and dangerous. In such cases, fools are simply wrong. They may be ignorant, stupid, liars, barking nuts, or a mixture of the four. But the one thing they are not is entitled to their opinion if their opinion is contradicted by reality and fact.

As the incredible folly of postmodern MAGA commitment to lies, deceit, ignorance, stupidity, and folly is now making clear, we cannot repudiate without catastrophe the ancient truth that error has no rights. Precisely what the imbeciles braying, “I am entitled to my truth about vaccines being part of the Great Microchip Conspiracy” are demonstrating is that such lies have no right to equal standing with truth. Nobody has an obligation to platform them. Nobody has an obligation to listen to them. Everybody has an obligation to denounce, refute, ignore, and scotch the spread of them. And the state, depending on the gravity of the lie in question, has an obligation to penalize and punish those responsible for creating and spreading them.

That does not mean auto-de-fe’s and the rack. But it does absolutely mean that you don’t get to “Teach the Controversy” about the Flat Earth in science class as though the sphericity of the earth is one valid view among many. It means that if you spread idiocy about windmill cancer, you don’t get to be an oncologist no matter how entitled you feel.

It means that if you spread misinformation about a pandemic, you should be punished and penalized and made to suffer for your crimes against the common good, whether by expulsion from social media, or fines, or jail, or crushing insurance costs, or other penalties–no matter how entitled you feel. It means that if you harass gun massacre victims, you should lose your job and your media platform and be bled white financially to compensate for your crime against them–no matter how entitled you feel.

It means that if you commit a treasonous insurrection or act as accomplice to it, you should go to prison–no matter how entitled you feel. It means that if you lie about Dominion voting systems corrupting the election without a shred of evidence–they can and should sue you for a billion dollars–no matter how entitled you feel. Reality does not care about your sense of entitlement to an opinion. You have no right to a lie. Error has no rights.

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Error Has No Rights - Stumbling Toward Heaven (markpshea.com)

Mark Shea is a Catholic author and blogger whose latest book, The Church’s Best-Kept Secret: A Primer on Catholic Social Teaching, was published in September 2020 by New City Press.

Sunday Sermon: Fear of the Light

Leon Bloy:

Man lives gropingly in his little cell of darkness, knowing nothing of those at his right hand or of those who are at his left, unable to guess the true name of those who weep above or those who suffer below, with no premonition of what he is in himself, and without ever understanding the murmurs or the shouting which vaguely reverberate through the resounding chambers.

There is a saying, “Disreputable people are afraid of the light.” And what about respectable people—does anyone think that light puts them at their ease? If light still remained to be created, I don’t know what the rogues would do, but I know well what the respectable would not do.

As it is, we see none too clearly on this our planet, where even the most clear-sighted grope. Yet it would seem that even this is too much light, since everybody hides himself. What would happen if Science came to bring out a new ‘ray’ which would light up the caverns of men’s hearts?

Is it not obvious that all business would become at once impracticable, impossible? No more trade, no more industry, no more political deals, no more medicine, no more pharmacy, no more cooking, no more lawsuits, no more marriages, nor burials, nor wills, nor ‘good works’ of any sort. And, in the end, no more love. Respectable people would cease to be born. There would remain to busy themselves in the squirmings of humanity only those who fear the light and who are called ‘disreputable people’. What strange disorder!

Let us hope these misfortunes will not come to pass, and that disreputable people as well as the respectable, those who fear the light as well as those who merely find it indiscreet, will continue to invigorate each other under the blue vault of the sky and to mutually abet each other in the poetic setting of bailiffs, policemen, and greenery. The universal harmony demands it.

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(from “The Wisdom of the Bourgeois” in Pilgrim of the Absolute)

Léon Bloy - Wikipedia

"Smile," said the photographer. "I am smiling," said Leon Bloy.

Sunday Sermon: Soap, Soup, and Salvation

[If Alex Chilton's Big Star is the greatest band that never made it big, Lone Justice isn't far behind.] 

Soap, Soup, and Salvation 

All ill-fated sorts
Who sleep on doorsteps and in alleyways
Take a stumble to the corner
There's heavenly music playin'

No more taking recreation
With your dark defeated friends
They who seek the consolation of the bottle
Never win

Soap, soup and salvation
Tired hearts sing in jubilation
Restoration at the rescue mission
Soap, soup and salvation

Well, Brother Randall is a bit
Long winded and a little loud
And as he pounds the pulpit
The sweat flies from his brow

Making sure none are caught slumbering
In this mournful motley crowd
For the ones that stay awake
Are therefore graciously endowed with...

Soap, soup and salvation
Tired hearts sing in jubilation
Restoration at the rescue mission
Soap, soup and salvation

Procter & Gamble
Campbell's gospel
Watch Brother Randall wave that bible

Bein' drunk and hungry
Seemed like more fun cause
They don't feed no one
Til' all this preachin's done, oh no

I just thought I heard the choir singing
My old favorite song
That old harmony is still familiar
Though it's been so long

Lonely faces, and empty glances
They surround me everywhere
But those sweet angelic voices
Are now rising through the air...

"When the roll is called up yonder"
"When the roll is called up yonder"
"When the roll is called up yonder"
"When the roll is called up yonder, I'll be there"
With...

Soap, soup and salvation
Tired hearts sing in jubilation
Restoration at the rescue mission
Soap, soup and salvation
With...

Soap, soup and salvation
Tired hearts sing in jubilation
Restoration at the rescue mission
Soap, soup and salvation

Soap, soup and salvation

(Written by Maria McKee; performed/recorded by Lone Justice)

Lone Justice album version: (60) Soap, Soup And Salvation - YouTube

Lone Justice live version: (60) Lone Justice - Soap, Soup And Salvation - YouTube

Saturday Lecture: Deconstructing Virtue

{Is all so-called virtue merely ‘virtue signaling’? Are we all entitled to benefits based on our 'perpetual moral disabilities'? Such were the arguments made some 1600 years ago by Bishop Augustine of Hippo, the man who invented the introspective conscience of the West. ¹ For Augustine, human reason, passion, and will were an unholy trinity that ruled over the human soul; neither individually nor in any combination could they be trusted. What was left? Faith, of course, and divine grace; in what follows, however, there is little of those. Instead, and what makes this essay of such interest, E.J. Hundert explains how Augustine ruthlessly applied a hermeneutic of suspicion to every human action, motive, and virtue; we learn that Augustine was a pioneer of deconstruction (of human behavior) and unmasking (of human moral pretensions). You might even refer to Augustine’s moral reasoning as CMT: Critical Moral Theory.}

“Reason is and must always be the slave of the passions.” (David Hume)

“All human acts cry out to be deconstructed…” (E.J. Hundert)

E.J. Hundert on Augustine’s understanding of "the divided self":

Augustine argued that reason itself, rather than providing suitable criteria for moral choice in rational beings, only functions instrumentally in self-interested creatures. Reason offers to human actors strategies for the attainment of their ends, but in no way can unaided reason provide efficient guidance to an agent for the choice of these ends themselves, since they are always objects decided by the passions alone.

Augustine’s reasoning explains how beings who were created in God’s image and who retain, even in their fallen state, the capacity for rational choice, are nevertheless drawn to the evil they properly despise. When Augustine disobeyed his parents and teachers as a boy, he did so not because he wanted to do something better with his time but from no other motives but frivolity and competitiveness. When he and his friends stole some pears from a neighbor’s orchard, they did so not because they wanted to eat but for the singular desire to be wicked: the act of theft itself made the indifferent fruit delicious.

Most evil deeds appear rationally unintelligible because the satisfactions they bring bear no necessary relation to the intrinsic worth of their objects. They remain inexplicable if considered within the context of the traditional moral argument that sought in reason’s governance a bridle to passion’s power. Augustine claimed that the impulse to evil cannot be accounted for by bodily or social circumstances external to the soul, just as his own experience demonstrated (he insisted) that evil acts were not the consequence of false beliefs induced by fallacious reasoning. The paradox of evil derives from the fact that it appears fully formed and fully effective even in the young and well-nurtured child whose will could not plausibly have been so perversely shaped by the environment in which he lived.

Augustine isolated the paradox which lies behind all purely mortal achievements by bringing into sharp focus the final emptiness of human virtues. Every worldly action, regardless of its apparent grandeur, must in fact properly be reduced to its elemental, self-regarding sources if it is to become morally comprehensible; and none more so than the apparent ‘loftiness’ of the great and the seemingly charitable acts of the mighty. Indeed, all human acts cry out to be deconstructed into the merely outward expressions of unacknowledged inner needs, the forever incomplete and so active attempts at happiness by morally blind sensibilities living under the dominion of their overpowering and incomprehensible wills.

Such moral rigorism was the conceptual foundation of an ongoing project developed by Augustine’s early modern successors. If the proper account of action depended on an exact evaluation of emotions, then the moralist had before him an enormous, virtually never-ending task of psychological decoding. Just as vice sought by dissimulation to parade as virtue and so cried out for exposure, almost all apparent virtues were themselves only the residue of one hidden, self-interested passion checking another. Self-deceived but ever seeking to deceive their fellows, men resembled nothing so much as actors consumed by the performative requirements of the parts they played.

It was possible to conceive of an individual’s life as a journey of self-discovery; even so, any presentation of the self within this life was an act tainted by self-regard. Obsessive seekers of the world’s applause, men were obliged to conceal from the gaze of others those signs of pride whose exposure would reveal as unobtainable the ‘delights’ they compulsively sought from society.

Thus, after Augustine, the bringing to consciousness of hidden impulses through the activity of unmasking became for Christian intellectuals a duty, one of placing before a properly chagrined consciousness the otherwise concealed evidence of the self’s perpetual moral disabilities.

________________________________________

Augustine and the Sources of the Divided Self on JSTOR (Original publication 1992)

¹ Credit for that invention had long been given to Paul the apostle, but Krister Stendahl debunked that claim decades ago.

On "Morality" and "Apocalypse Porn"

{Each of today's brief readings is provocative in its own way; 'Caveat lector,' as always.}

Forget morality, says a professor at the University of Toronto. Moral philosophy is bogus, and Professor Ronnie de Sousa should know, having taught classes in moral philosophy over the years. Writing at Aeon, he informs us that the entire enterprise of “morality” is a sham:

Morality is a shadow of religion, serving to comfort those who no longer accept divine guidance but still hope for an ‘objective’ source of certainty about right and wrong. Moralists claim to discern the existence of commands as inescapable as those of an omniscient and omnipotent God. Those commands, moral philosophers teach, deserve to prevail over all other reasons to act – always, everywhere, and for all time.

To which reasoning Professor de Sousa replies, “Not so fast”. He suggests, rather than allowing ourselves to be bullied by moralists (of whatever sort), “When making choices, we should consider our reasons without asking what is ‘morally right’.” This blatantly counterintuitive proposal need not open the door to license or to moral anarchy; we can still act rationally even if we forego cloaking our reasons under the guise of “moral imperatives”. De Sousa continues:

As the philosopher Joel Marks has argued before me, to renounce morality is to wake up to the fact that in every choice we are governed by desires. Some desires are for something we just want for itself; others are for ways or means of satisfying those. All constitute or are grounded in reasons to act. Those reasons can be almost exactly those that move a moralist. I have perfectly good reasons for my desire not to cause harm, not to act unfairly, or to be kind. These reasons derive both from my first-order reasons and from my reflection on them. They matter not because of morality, but because I care.

Since God is dead, it makes perfect sense to bury alongside him the kind of “totalizing morality” he represented, along with the elaborate system of carrots and sticks, some in this world and some in the next, that sustained that system for millennia. That, at least, is Professor de Sousa’s modest proposal; make of it what you will.

Five reasons why moral philosophy is distracting and harmful | Aeon Essays

At Spiked, Brendan O’Neill unloads on purveyors of what he calls “Apocalypse porn”: those who provide us images of raging wildfires and disastrous floods, accompanied by doomsday warnings about climate change. As O’Neill explains:

Like all scolds, the eco-apocalypstas seem to take pleasure in telling the rest of us that we’re doomed, that the planet will be consumed by heat death if we don’t alter our habits. ‘With raging wildfires, floods and pandemics, it seems like End Times – and it’s our own damned fault’, says a writer for the Hill. ‘Immediate repentance’ is required, says the Guardian, sticking with the frankly mad religious view of floods and fires as violent rebukes for humankind’s eco-sins. And of course, the ‘immediate repentance’ that is required is not saying the rosary a couple of times – it’s ‘immediate and deep emissions cuts’. What about the people of China, India and Brazil who still haven’t achieved our standard of living and who must emit a great deal more carbon in order to do so, I hear you ask? Don’t be silly. They don’t matter. The world’s on fire.”

O’Neill goes on to decry “the sheer opportunism, the speed with which every natural calamity – regardless of whether it can actually be linked to climate change – is politicized and exploited. Every fire and flood is turned into a horror film that the West’s bored middle classes then use to promote their drab green agenda.”

Politicized? O’Neill seems to be of two minds on that matter, dismissing the “drab green agenda” as a politicization of natural disasters while himself claiming that the problems we face are not about climate change but about political malfeasance:

“If the Greek fires are down to the hubristic excesses of modern man, then we don’t need to talk about EU austerity and how it impacted on the Greek public sector, including its capacity to fight fires. It’s not Brussels’ fault – it’s your fault for driving to Sainsbury’s in a diesel car twice a week. Likewise, Erdogan’s failure to prepare for the wildfires in Turkey gets buried by the global media’s obsessive belief that every fire is a warning from Gaia. And the fact that the floods in Europe seem to have been exacerbated by poor planning is just casually pushed aside, buried under the guff about Poseidon’s wrath and End Times. No wonder German ministers are happy to talk up the eco-apocalypse – it takes attention away from their own failures of vision and infrastructure.”

Are not those failures of planning and preparation themselves the result of governments not taking seriously the warnings about climate change and its consequences? O’Neill does not say, perhaps because he knows the answer. It is climate activists who have begged national and global leaders to act, both to mitigate the greenhouse warming and to invest in resources and infrastructure to deal with what we know is coming. If Greek, Turkish, German, and American leaders have not responded with an adequate sense of urgency, perhaps it is because people like Brendan O’Neill keep downplaying, and even mocking, environmental concerns.

Finally, O’Neill plays the “everything is actually getting better” card: “As Bjorn Lomborg has pointed out, ‘Ever fewer people die from climate-related catastrophes.’ Even as the human population has quadrupled over the past century, deaths from climate disasters ‘have dropped 20-fold’. The death risk from natural calamities or extreme weather has fallen 99 per cent since the 1920s.” To which I can only offer in rebuttal this quote from Mark Twain: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Just because we now have more and better lifeboats does not mean we should dismiss the impending deluge; catastrophism may not help, but neither will complacency.

Apocalypse porn - spiked (spiked-online.com)

Thursday Thoughts

{To paraphrase Descartes: I have thoughts, therefore I am going to post them online.}

“You must change your life.” (Rainer Maria Rilke)

What Ben Ehrenreich (at The New Republic) calls “the shell game of global capital” has one purpose and one purpose only: to enrich those who run it. The health of our societies, and even the health of the planet itself, is of peripheral concern at best; it is not an item that appears on corporate balance sheets—though it often figures prominently in “green” marketing campaigns.

In “We’re Hurtling Toward Global Suicide,” Ehrenreich makes yet another impassioned plea for “us” to do something. He points out that the discussion of arresting climate change continues to be framed in terms of perpetual economic growth, as if we can sustain our affluent lifestyle by painting it green. “We” don’t intend to make sacrifices; “they” will have to pry our GDP from our cold, dead fingers.

Ehrenreich is skeptical even of the Green New Deal and of the promise of a thriving “green economy”. He cites U.S. climate envoy John Kerry, who recently told CNN that “literally millions of jobs” would soon be created, [with] “new products coming online,” and about oil companies’ newfound passion for “carbon capture and storage and so forth.” The private sector, Kerry said, “has already made the decision that there is money to be made here, that’s capitalism, and they are investing in that future.” If that makes you nervous, it shouldn’t, Kerry insisted. The changes ahead would be like the analog-to-digital shift of the 1990s, only better: “the important point for people to really focus on is it’s a very exciting economic transition.”

Ben Ehrenreich does not buy that for a second:

In climate policy jargon, the crucial concept is “decoupling.” The notion lies deep in the hidden heart of the “sustainable development goals” held dear by international bodies such as the United Nations and the World Bank: Economic growth can be safely divorced from the ecological damage that it has heretofore almost universally wreaked. If the train of capital appears to be hurtling us toward the abyss, we can cut the engine loose and cruise someplace more comfortable: same train, same speed, different destination. Like millions of clean-tech jobs and a crisis-induced transition magically unlocking unimaginable wealth, it is an attractive and reassuring idea. The only problem is that there is next to no evidence that anything analogous has ever occurred, or that it is likely to occur in the future.   

What we are facing, says Ehrenreich, is conclusive proof of “Fredric Jameson’s oft-cited dictum that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” Not only that; it is apparently easier to experience the inexorably approaching end of the world than to contemplate the end of capitalism or a drop in the value of our stock holdings. It may be the end of the world as we know it, but we feel fine.

We’re Hurtling Toward Global Suicide | The New Republic

“I believe that justice and the common good require that laws and policies be shaped in light of our best judgments of what makes for and detracts from a valuable and morally worthy way of life. Law cannot be, and must not aspire to be, substantively neutral—that is, neutral on questions of morality and human well-being and fulfillment.” (Robert P. George) 

At The Public Discourse, Serena Sigillito and Robert George agree that civil discourse would be possible, if only the secular-progressive elite would surrender:

Secular progressive ideology is ascendant in the elite institutions of our society: the federal government, many state governments, universities, news and entertainment media, the arts, professions and professional associations, labor unions, charitable foundations, major business corporations, and on and on. David Brooks rightly says that this gives the “Woke” a monopoly, or near monopoly, on cultural power. Obviously, it enables the transmission of Woke ideology—a fundamentalist and increasingly militant pseudo-religion—to rising generations and makes it difficult for dissenters to challenge that ideology and, indeed, to survive without being subjected to discrimination and even “cancellation.”

Those of us who do challenge it, whether in the name of natural law and natural rights or from some other perspective, are fighting what amounts to an intellectual guerrilla war against an extremely powerful and deeply entrenched adversary. That it is an intellectual war—a war for hearts and minds—doesn’t make it any easier. One would expect a certain amount of pessimism in these circumstances.

 I am not sure how declaring “war,” intellectual or otherwise, promotes civil discourse; but then, I am not Robert P. George, who is good friends with Cornel West (“a dear, dear friend, truly a brother”), thereby proving his bona fides as a fair and open-minded combatant.

Bemoaning “cancel culture,” George then offers a (partial) list of who and what he wants to cancel: pornography, abortion, “gender affirmation” surgery (the scare quotes are George’s), same-sex marriage, etc. George acknowledges that “my conception and defense of equality, or my conceptions and defenses of basic civil liberties such as freedom of speech and religious liberty, are natural-law conceptions and defenses—they reflect judgments about human goods and how best to protect them; they are not shaped by, or grounded in, appeals to an alleged requirement of moral neutrality.” The very idea of moral neutrality is offensive to George, as he explains:

The fundamental error in the forms of liberalism that have been dominant in academic philosophy and political theory in my lifetime has been the belief that, in constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice, it is necessary for law and government to retain a stance of neutrality on questions of what makes for, or detracts from, a valuable and morally worthy way of life.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of a valuable and morally worthy way of life: are those not the inalienable rights enshrined in our Declaration of Independence?

Moral neutrality being both impossible and undesirable, government must impose some version of morality and virtue upon its citizens, who of course have conflicting views on the matter. Those conflicting views will be resolved by the simple expedient of gaining political power; whoever does so will call the tune. That such an approach raises the political stakes considerably does not disturb Mr. George or his ideological allies; they have been calling for a “culture war” for decades now, and they know that wars inevitably result in casualties. Their goal is not toleration but domination, and they are certain they have God on their side.

Why can the rest of us not get that through our thick, woke skulls?

Can We Still Reason Together? A Conversation with Robert P. George - Public Discourse (thepublicdiscourse.com)

Sunday Sermon

Norman Geras, from “Minimum Utopia” (2000):

We live in a world not only replete with injustices large and small and the most appalling horrors, but, what is nearly as bad, also oversupplied with a tolerance for such things on the part of most of those not suffering from them. I have tried to encapsulate this idea — the great tolerance people have for the sufferings of others, the living comfortably with them, the attitude of practical unconcern — in the hypothesis of a “contract of mutual indifference”. 

According to this, the relationship holding between most of the earth’s inhabitants may be thought of as governed by the implicit agreement, ‘in exchange for being released by you from any putative duty or expectation calling upon me to come to your aid in distress, I similarly release you’. 

The core argument for imputing this agreement to people may be stated as follows. If you do not come to the aid of others who are under grave assault, in acute danger or crying need, you cannot reasonably expect others to come to your aid in similar emergency; you cannot consider them so obligated to you. Other people, equally, unmoved by the emergencies of others, cannot reasonably expect to be helped in deep trouble themselves, or consider others obligated to help them.

Imagine, as a limit position, a world in which nobody ever came to the aid of anyone else under grave assault or cognate misfortune. Even though no formal agreement had been made between the individuals of this world to the effect that they owed one another, under threat or misfortune, nothing in the way of aid or care, the case for imputing such an agreement to them would be compelling. For, given their by-standing dispositions, no one could reasonably entertain a contrary expectation towards the generality of his fellows: along the lines, for example, ‘even though I shall do nothing for others very unfortunately placed myself, nevertheless I think they would be obliged to help me and I shall look forward to their help should I ever need it.’ No one could persuasively defend such an expectation to other people.

Now, I do not say that the actual world is exactly like the one just described. There are obviously qualifications needed to that description. The most important of them is that people do also act altruistically; they act, at times, in sympathy or solidarity with others; they come to their aid or rescue. I have myself written about some brave examples of this. I claim, even so, that the idea of a contract of mutual indifference captures rather too well the moral logic operating in the world in which we live. Most people, most of the time, do not do enough to oppose or remedy the moral enormities and ensuring forms of wretchedness which they know about.

This is not an uplifting thesis, and in proposing it at length I have made a point of emphasizing that it is not…the moral logic is discomfiting all right, but mere discomfiture cannot show that it is not compelling in its way.

We need to find ways of overturning, reversing, the contract of mutual indifference so that a different ethic, an ideal of multivious ¹ care, could come to prevail. Some notion of this kind has always been implicit in socialist versions of utopia, whatever socialism’s more unilaterally ‘scientific’ adherents might have reckoned to the contrary. The contrast between a society that would give proper weight to individual need and one regulated at every level by deep inequalities of wealth already tells us this to a degree. All the same, to the extent that the strategic focus of much socialist theorizing has been on economic and political structures and institutions and on how to change them, not enough attention has been devoted to exploring the specific contours of a socialist critique. My final thesis is that the latter would have to incorporate — integrally — duties of aid and rescue…

We should not simply assume that the institutional framework, or a ‘spontaneity’ of attitudes arising from it, would suffice to result in the requisite behavior on the part of individuals in a future utopia, all doing what was necessary to keep each other safe and well. Any set of projected minimum utopian institutions is open to potential ruin if these are not actively supported and surrounded by a rich moral consciousness of the duty of care. This is in fact the principal burden of my hypothesis of the contract of mutual indifference: it brings out just how the structural and procedural provisions of a utopia, a projectedly good or well-ordered society, are rendered nugatory — actually ineffective, literally uncompelling — by the absence of a vigorous culture of reciprocal help to meet the threat and the incidence of violation. Such a culture will need a corresponding institutional framework in order to flourish, a framework of, among other things, a robust and self-active democracy; but the institutional framework will likewise depend upon the moral culture. Without it, it will either not come into being or not survive.

Intellectually, the road to utopia goes by way of looking into the moral darkness.

https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/geras1.htm

¹ “Multivious”: “having many ways, roads, or paths”.

Our "Spiritual Blackout"

In 2017, Cornel West delivered the convocation address at Harvard University. The following excerpts are from that address. I was going to save them for a “Sunday Sermon,” but then I remembered “the fierce urgency of now”. 

Here, then, is Dr. Cornel West:

The moral catastrophe is real, what I'm calling the relative eclipse of integrity, honesty, and decency, not just in this empire, but around the world. And what do I mean by moral catastrophe? We’re not talking about politics, we’re not talking about ideology. We’re talking about the kinds of human beings being shaped by the weakened institutions in our world. We’re talking about spiritual blackout.

Spiritual blackout is the normalizing of mendacity, to make lives appear as if they’re a part of the normal order of things. For example, we believe in justice, but not a justice that sends the Wall Street executive who engages in the massive criminality of insider trading, market manipulation, fraudulent activity, and predatory lending to jail. Spiritual blackout is the naturalizing of criminality, when crimes against humanity become part of the natural order of things. One out of two black children under six years old live in poverty in the richest nation in the history of the world. That’s not just wrong, that’s not just unjust, that’s a certain kind of crime against humanity. Where is our public discussion about it? Where are the voices? Where is the moral outrage? Where’s the righteous indignation? No, we just fit in, it’s just business as usual.

Drone strikes have been killing innocent children for the last ten years, and yes, they were happening under our dear brother Barack Obama whom so many fell in love with becoming blind when it came to his complicity in war crimes. We normalize criminality. So this normalization is not just a matter of the new occupant of the White House. It’s too easy to fetishize Donald Trump. But he is as American as apple pie, he just represents the worst of America. Don’t isolate him. Don’t act as if he dropped out of the sky. No, no, he comes out of very deep, organic traditions in the country. Phobias that make us lose sight of our precious trans brothers and sisters, of our bisexual folk and lesbians and gays, black people, indigenous people, Latinos, working people. Across the board, moral catastrophe.

Spiritual blackout not only normalizes mendacity and naturalizes criminality, it also encourages callousness, it elevates machismo identity, and it rewards indifference. William James, the greatest of all public intellectuals, used to say indifference is the one trait that makes the very angels weep. Rabbi Heschel says indifference to evil is more insidious than evil itself. Encouraging indifference where machismo identity is defined in terms of being manly and mature rather than cowardly and insecure is a sign of a spiritual blackout.

So, when we look at Donald Trump, we ought not to engage in the sophomoric name-calling and finger-pointing that we get too often from the corporate media—the very corporate media that, in one sense, helped produce that Frankenstein, given their obsession with money and revenue and profit. I think it was the CEO of NBC that said we understand that Trump’s bad for America, but he’s good for us. So much for public interest, so much for the common good. We see what’s really running things, this market-driven, predatory capitalism that’s obsessed with short-term gain, that’s obsessed with superficial success. What about spiritual issues, where greatness has to do with he or she who is serving the least of these, rather than just the smartest in the room?

That neo-liberal soul-craft has become hegemonic across ideologies, across politics, across color, across sexual orientation, where the very end and aim is to focus on smartness, dollars, and bombs, rather than wisdom, and compassion, and service to the least of these. That’s a sign of spiritual blackout, so when we look at brother Donald Trump, we ought to also look inside of ourselves. There are elements inside of us that need to be wrestled with. 

We need more than just courage. We need spiritual and moral dimensions that are tied to that courage. We need fortitude, we need greatness of character, we need magnanimity, and that fortitude that embraces the courage that provides us with a kind of moral and spiritual orientation. We can hold off the obsession with short-term gain and hold off the obsession with raw ambition and self-promotion, but it’s part of the civil war raging inside of each and every one of us.

That’s what I love about the great legacy of Athens, learning how to die in order to learn how to live, trying to fight off those narrow prejudices—that parochialism, provincialism, hedonism, narcissism, and narrow individualism—that try to hold us back. We have to understand the difference between the quest for individuality in community and the narrow, rugged, rapacious individualism that leaves us isolated and deracinated and rootless and unable to connect in such an atomized world. 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

West’s phrase “individuality in community” strikes a chord with me, as I have been reading recently about the Russian ideal of sobornost’, which Ivan Kireevsky defined as:

“The wholeness of society, combined with the personal independence and the individual diversity of the citizens, which is possible only on the condition of a free subordination of separate persons to absolute values and in their free creativeness founded on love of the whole…”

What Cornel West was talking about was our need for sobornost’, a need which has not diminished in the three years since he spoke.

The complete convocation address is at this link and it is worth your time:

https://hds.harvard.edu/news/2017/09/08/transcript-cornel-wests-2017-convocation-address#

Albert Camus: "The work of attention"

“The time for abstractions is over.” (Albert Camus, at the close of World War II)

Yesterday I wrote about Leon Trotsky and what I termed his “Achilles heel,” i.e., his preference for abstract ideas over concrete things and for generalizations over specifics. By chance, I was reading, later in the day, Robert Zaretsky’s A Life Worth Living, his extended meditation on the life of Albert Camus, and I came across a discussion of “the dangers of abstraction,” a subject which, according to Zaretsky, “preoccupied Camus”:

In 1947, the same year as the publication of The Plague, Camus reread the school notebooks in which he had recorded his thoughts for more than a decade. The effect was sobering: “I have read over all these notebooks— beginning with the first. This was obvious to me: landscapes gradually disappear. The modern cancer is gnawing at me too.” In other words, his memory of the world…was fading while his preoccupation with ideas grew. This same distancing struck him during a flight that same year from Paris to Algiers: “The airplane as one of the elements of modern negation and abstraction. There is no more nature; the deep gorge, true relief, the impassable mountain stream, everything disappears. There remains a diagram— a map. Man, in short, looks through the eyes of God. And he perceives then that God can have but an abstract view. This is not a good thing.”

“The modern cancer” to which Camus referred was a toxic amalgam of abstract thinking and physical distancing from nature, an amalgam in which reality is reduced to “a diagram—a map”. The problem, of course, is that the map, in the words of Alfred Korzybski, is not the territory.

What is the cure for Camus' "modern cancer”? The cure, says Zaretsky, is attention; attention to detail, attention to “the particular and concrete,” attention to individual human persons, attention to the territory itself rather than to the map. ¹ Zaretsky explains:

The moral imagination, for Camus as for Simone Weil, is the work of attention. Attention to the physical world in its inflexible and indifferent attitude toward us, attention to our fellow human beings in our common struggle to resist this cosmic indifference… Camus’ essays also reflect…the ways in which force, be it war or factories or governments, transforms human beings into things. “Neither Victims nor Executioners” is both an echo and reply to Weil’s claim that those who wield power are no less its victims than those who are subjected to it. Finally, the articles flow from Camus’ lifelong attachment to the particular and concrete, and his enduring suspicion of the general and abstract. As he declared in the opening article, “The Century of Fear,” we have lost the habit of speaking “the language of humanity” founded on the everyday realities of our lives when we “confront the beauty of the world and people’s faces.” In each instance of these crimes, Camus wrote, “it was impossible to persuade the people who were doing these things not to do them, because they were sure of themselves and because there is no way of persuading an abstraction.”

Abstractions are not persuadable, nor are they easily refuted by reality, which is what makes ideologies so pernicious: facts do little if anything to debunk them or to dissuade their adherents. Against the antiseptic language and the vapid cliches deployed by ideologues, Camus insisted we must speak realistically and truthfully:

In his effort to “save bodies” carried atop the floodwaters of history, Camus diagnoses one of “the faults of our century”: people attached to the language of ideology or bureaucracy, he states, “lack imagination when it comes to other people’s deaths. . . . Just as we now love one another by telephone and work not on matter but on machines, we kill and are killed by proxy. What is gained in cleanliness is lost in understanding.” In order to salvage our understanding, moral and experiential, Camus insists we push aside the usual clichés we use and instead describe as faithfully as possible what it means to kill another man in a manner so methodical and deliberate. Rather than telling the doomed prisoner that he will atone for or repay society for his act, we should inform him that he “will be imprisoned for months or years, torn between an impossible despair and a constantly renewed terror.” And then, one day, he shall be carried, his hands tied behind his back and feet “dragging behind in the corridor” to the scaffold. An executioner will “finally seize you by the seat of your pants and throw you horizontally on a board while another will steady your head in the lunette and a third will let fall from a height of seven feet a hundred-and- twenty- pound blade that will slice off your head like a razor.” ²

The devil is always in the details, the very details that are glossed over, deliberately or not, by abstraction and generalization. Once we lose sight of the details of human existence, and particularly of the details of human suffering, then the devil is loose among us. For evidence of that claim, please consult the history of the twentieth century or, alternatively, the autobiography of Leon Trotsky.

____________________________________

http://filozofia.uni-miskolc.hu/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Robert-Zaretsky-A-Life-Worth-Living_-Albert-Camus-and-the-Quest-for-Meaning-Belknap-Press-2013.pdf

¹ The theme of “attention” was not uncommon in the postwar world. Arthur Miller, writing around the same time as Camus, insisted (in “Death of a Salesman”) that “Attention must be paid!” When the murder of six million Jews manages to escape notice, it is fair to say that not enough attention was being paid.

To briefly elaborate: "attention" goes hand in hand with "intention". If we live without paying attention, then our intentions are unlikely to be realized; in fact, they may backfire upon us, or even, in the worst cases, pave the road to hell. To be inattentive is to be careless and lazy; to be unintentional is to be ruled by accident and to act by caprice.

² Such graphic, explicit description might also help people understand what victims of our latest plague, COVID-19, are experiencing.

New Blinks

At Aeon, Daniel Callcut revisits Susan Wolf’s 1982 essay “Moral Saints,” an essay in which Ms. Wolf declared, “I am glad that neither I nor those about whom I care most are moral saints.” It turns out that moral saints (is there any other kind?), at least as described by Wolf, are insufferable, guilt-inducing killjoys, driven either by a kind of cheerfully masochistic altruism or by an irritatingly inflexible sense of duty; making them, in either case, no fun to be around.

One might quibble about the definition. “Saint” has both a technical meaning in certain religions and a more general meaning; as to the latter, Webster’s says that “saint” refers to “a person who is exceptionally good, kind, patient, etc.” One need not be perfect to be exceptional; Susan Wolf clearly had a higher bar in mind for her saints, who are either grim rigorists or selfless eccentrics.  

In any case: what Callcut, following Wolf, wants to do is to retain the binding force of morality while allowing for a well-rounded, sociable and comfortable human life; one in which a person can have a “brilliantly sarcastic sense of humor” and enjoy, if she chooses, “lazy summer nights watching the bees hum in the lavender.”      

I’m all for that, and I think Dorothy Day and St. Francis of Assisi would be on board as well. For that matter, despite his strictures toward perfection, Jesus himself seemed relaxed enough in dealing with sinners, aka imperfect human beings; it was, to the contrary, pretensions to perfection that rankled him. Callcut’s conclusion seems perfectly consistent with the Sermon on the Mount:

Morality doesn’t require you to have no other interests besides morality. You have a life. Having a life doesn’t mean that you don’t take morality seriously or that you have given up on trying to be a decent person.

If the bad news is that it’s hard to be a saint in the city, the good news is that we don’t have to be saints; being ordinarily decent human beings will suffice.

https://aeon.co/essays/why-it-is-better-not-to-aim-at-being-morally-perfect

It’s been a while since I’ve visited Maria Popova’s website, Brain Pickings. If you’re not familiar with it, there’s no better time to try it than now—Ms. Popova’s list of her favorite books of 2018 gives you an idea of the eclectic range of her interests, her passions, and her erudition. In this one article she commends to readers the likes of Ursula Le Guinn, Zadie Smith, Audre Lorde, Rebecca Solnit, Anne Lamott, John Kraag, Alan Lightman, Michael Pollan, Amanda Stern, and more, providing brief but helpful commentaries on (and excerpts from) the books she cites. It’s quite a bravura performance, and you shouldn’t miss it.

https://www.brainpickings.org/   

Finally, and related to my recent post regarding ideological thinking, the following is from Marilynne Robinson’s introduction to her latest book of essays, WHAT ARE WE DOING HERE? Ms. Robinson (who, many are surprised to learn, grew up in Sandpoint, Idaho) says that she is “too old to mince words,” and this excerpt is a case in point:

We have surrendered thought to ideology. Every question is for all purposes the same question, every answer the same answer. Why has anyone done anything? Self-interest. This is true of the whole species, but it is most emphatically true of Americans. Where in all this is wisdom, courage, generosity, personal dignity. These qualities are merely apparent, never determinant. To think in such terms is naïve. To say that we as a national community have benefited from them, that individuals have actually considered the general welfare from time to time and addressed it, is to slide into shameless nationalism. The Right is more than happy to be excused from these ideals, standards that have, historically, been invoked in order to mitigate the uglier impulses, greed prominent among them. The Left cannot account for the civic virtues in theoretical or ideological terms and feels awkward speaking of them in religious terms. This is only truer because the Right has made religious language toxic by putting it to uses that offend generosity and dignity. Perhaps the worst thing about ideological thinking is that it implies a structure in and behind events, a history that is reiterative, with variations that cannot ultimately change the course of things and are therefore always trivial, no matter how much thought and labor goes into the making of them…

The [Left’s] concept of class war [gives permission] to people on the right who consider themselves successful, therefore embattled. They can resist arguments for economic justice as if they were existential threats, the grumblings of resentment that, if acted on, would loot them of their trophies. In this country, at least, it is more temperament than circumstance that leads people to identify themselves with one side or the other. Meanwhile, actual American workers have no place in the conversation…

So it is with our contemporary Left and Right. Between them we circle in a maelstrom of utter fatuousness.

Better known as a novelist (notably GILEAD, HOME, and LILA), Ms. Robinson is also a fine essayist, and in WHY ARE WE HERE? she is in fine form.